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This show once subverted a ban by being performed on the back of a truck. It returns as part of this year’s Melbourne Fringe.
was banned in Melbourne – because of how it portrayed the Nazis. The German Consulate had lobbied the then-federal government with their complaint So, the Melbourne-based New Theatre group got around the ban by performing the show on the back of a flat bed truck – which could quickly be moved if police approached.
Truck advertising the New Theatre’s production of anti-fascist play Till the Day I Die in Sydney, circa September 1941. The ban on the play had been recently lifted. This month, as part of Melbourne Fringe, the show is coming back – and in a nod to the past, this version will be staged in part on a flatbed ute.
Till The Day I Die“It just became clear that we had to do it, and that it was speaking to now so potently, kind of almost absurdly,” says Wilson. The play protests the rise of Nazism and was written by American Clifford Odets in 1935. It’s become more relevant in some ways, says Sfetkidis, which is “kind of scary and absurd”. Harry Dowling A real force in American playwriting, Odets is rarely performed locally.
But according to the show’s directors, his writing is brilliant, his control of tone and content extraordinary. Sfetkidis says it’s also very funny: “One minute, you’re laughing at how silly someone is and then the next minute, you’re watching something incredibly horrific. Both things happening throughout the play and that’s the mastery of the way Odets has been able to craft such a great script.
”There are clearly good guys and bad guys in the work, says Wilson, but it is also interested in the contradictions within far-right ideology. No two of the characters who are Nazis are for the same reasons, and so the internal contradictions of the ideology are really laid bare, he reflects. Sfetkidis came across the play as part of her research into the history of protests in the City of Yarra.
She is about to take a deep dive into the history of the New Theatre group as part of a fellowship at Arts Centre Melbourne. Danny Delahunty, CEO and creative director of Melbourne Fringe Festival, Hayley Edwards with carrot, Linh Uendo/Dean, Katie Sfetkidis, Milo Hartil and Mark Wilson from Till The Day I Die.at Collingwood Town Hall in 1936, she says, about 2000 people had gathered on the streets outside, blocking Hoddle Street, all trying to get in to see the show.
Sfetkidis says she was keen to use theatre as a tool to start a political conversation around the rise of fascism.
“Actually talking about it openly in all its complexity is really important,” she says. “Witnessing it in ways that are not obvious, more complex and complicated than just being outraged or upset. ”“We need to get beyond outrage, as Katie says, and think about how to stop this stuff,” says Wilson. Several people told the co-directors that the show’s subject matter is “too hot” to produce at this moment in time.
“We now live in this world where people, for many reasons, are afraid to speak truth or speak about things that are happening,” says Sfetkidis. In rehearsals every now and then, Wilson explains, someone is overwhelmed by how much was known about what the Nazis were doing, even in the 1930s: “It’s an ugly thing that the world knew so much so early.
” The subversive play is one of more than 450 events at this year’s Melbourne Fringe Festival, which kicks off today. It is Victoria’s longest-running multi-arts festival and one of the largest in the country. Returning to celebrate its 10th year is Deadly Fringe, the First Nations commissioning program, headlined byby Joel Bray Dance, a free, daily participatory event at Fed Square, with light, music and dance.
Radical Access, which reimagines accessible art making, led by deaf, disabled and neurodivergent creatives, is also back.which sees David Wells improvise, dance, talk and collaborate with commuters and other artists at Footscray Station. It’s a remarkable 15-year community project by Wells and other artists who have been involved with Melbourne Fringe since 1983.
Joel Bray in, clockwise from top left, Chunky Move’s Dharawungara, Daddy and Biladurang.a joyous, absurd new work, while internet sensation James Ward appears in, a show built around a replica of the Harold Holt Swim Centre. Milo Hartill appears in a show she describes as “part cabaret, part song-cycle and part influencer-takeover”, calleda camp, absurdist post-humanist dark comedy complete with puppets, will be staged at La Mama, written by Charlie Star with Em Tambree, while Kelly Lim Harris will share outrageous stories from her life in, dissecting that term’s origins and linking them with her experiences as an Asian performer.
This year Fringe will also head north-west for four days of Fringe Encore: Ballarat. It will host two exclusives,RuPaul’s Drag Race Down UnderTop End Wedding, Nowhere
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